This book examines Duras's contribution to contemporary cinema. The 'dark room' in the
collection's title refers to one of Duras's metaphors for the writing process la chambre noire
as the solitary space of literary creation the place where she struggles to project her
'internal shadow' onto the blank page. The dark room is also a metaphor for the film theater
and by extension for the filmic experience. Duras rejected conventional forms of cinematic
address that encourage the spectator to develop a positive identification with the film's
diegesis and narrative. Her films create unusual rapports between image and sound diegetic and
extra-diegetic elements and textual and intertextual dimensions of cinematic representation.
In doing so they allow the film spectator to establish new connections with the screen. This
collection focuses on the aesthetic conceptual and political challenges involved in Duras's
innovative approach to cinematic representation from an interdisciplinar perspective including
film and literary theory psychoanalytic analysis music theory gender studies and
post-colonial criticism. The book opens with a theoretical introduction to Duras's cinematic
practice and its peculiar position in contemporary cinema and contemporary film theory and is
divided into five parts each one devoted to a specific aspect of Duras's films: the
interaction between literature and cinema (Part One) the reconfiguration of the cinematic gaze
(Part Two) and of the image sound relation (Part Three) the representation of history and
memory (Part Four) and of cultural identity (Part Five).
